The whole millennial generation today is all about renting rather than owning! Right? Be it shared cabs, carpools, co-working spaces, or renting home accessories, millennials are up for it. And following that premise, IIT-Guwahati graduates – Manish S. Sugandhi, Shubham Jain and Aditya Sharma launched GrabOnRent in the year 2015. Read this article to know more about GrabOnRent founders, competitors, funding, growth, wiki, and future plans.
GrabOnRent attempts to promote optimal utilization of the products by offering flexible rental times. This means that you can rent the item either on an hourly, daily or monthly basis.
GrabOnRent - Company Highlights
| Startup Name | GrabOnRent |
|---|---|
| Headquarter | Bengaluru, India |
| Sector | E-commerce |
| Founders | Aditya Sharma, Manish S Sugandhi, Shubham Jain |
| Founded | 2015 |
| ShutDown on | September 2020 |
| Legal Name | Grabonrent Internet Private Limited |
| Website | grabonrent.com |
GrabOnRent - About and How it Works
GrabOnRent - USP and Innovation
GrabOnRent - Founders and Team
How was GrabOnRent Started?
GrabOnRent - Startup Launch
GrabOnRent - Competitors
GrabOnRent - Funding and Investors
GrabOnRent - Growth
GrabOnRent - Future Plans
GrabOnRent - FAQs
StartupTalky
GrabOnRent - About and How it Works
GrabOnRent is ideally a product rental marketplace that aggregates various vendors in the market who own brick-and-mortar shops for rentals to the buyers on the platform. The idea of the co-founders behind GrabOnRent is to provide accessibility of the home products like furniture and other categories to everybody irrespective of their capacity to buy it.
GrabOnRent helps its users in renting products online across 8 major categories namely furniture, appliances, event supplies which includes lights, sound systems, etc, bicycles, cameras, gaming consoles, party items like hukka, barbeque, etc, and adventure gear. Also, it essentially enables the renting of cool gadgets such as Pebble Smartwatch, Kindle e-book readers, and Hoverboards. GrabOnRent has a provision that allows the buyer to try the product before buying for a minimal amount.
GrabOnRent follows a clear methodological bucket system to address the concerns of a wide population like in India. These four buckets are as follows:
- Discoverability – This bucket is all about creating awareness in the market and amongst the target market allowing them to browse the possible and available products on rent.
- Quality Assurance in refurbished products – This bucket stands in the list to improve the ‘sticky-ness’ towards the service GrabOnRent is providing and also gain the loyalty of the suppliers who have recurring customers due to the consistently improved quality.
- Convenience – This bucket includes online payment mechanisms (or COD) and effective logistics service, to and fro so that seamless experience can be provided to the consumers.
- Trust – This bucket involves dealing with a much-specialized product rental firm against vendor forms the basic layer of trust apart from the combination of quality assured products and supreme customer service to the users of GrabOnRent.
Things work pretty simply on GrabOnRent. All the users need to do is browse through the superiorly extensive array of products, then select the item they want to buy and go on to make the payment online towards the rent and security deposit. The item gets delivered to the user’s doorstep, without any further delay.
Each item at GrabOnRent passes through a very strict and stringent quality check before getting shipped to, therefore, ensure the best of services to the users. Post usage, the item gets picked up from the doorstep and the security deposit is returned online after verification and quality check of the used item.
StartupTalky
GrabOnRent - USP and Innovation
GrabOnRent has essentially tapped into the market that is being brought by the constantly shifting millennials of the current generation. These millennials do not care that much about putting down roots as the generations before them.
Moreover, this saves them a lot of money as well so obviously, this seems like a better option to them. On GrabOnRent’s website, the users can rent products as per their convenience, be it for an hour or a day or even for months and years. The interesting part is that both refurbished and new products are listed on this website.
GrabOnRent - Founders and Team
The founders of GrabOnRent are Manish S. Sugandhi, Shubham Jain and Aditya Sharma.
- Shubham Jain is the Co-founder and CEO at GrabOnRent. An IIT Guwahati graduate, Shubham has earlier co-founded Trip Engineers. Before GrabOnRent, he was working with Perdix Business Solutions as the Head of User Experience.
- Aditya Sharma is the Co-founder and CTO at GrabOnRent. Again, graduated from IIT Guwahati, Aditya was a senior R&D Engineer at Hewlett-Packard before launching his current venture.
- Manish S. Sugandhi, Co-founder of GrabOnRent - This venture is not Manish’s first. Before this one, he had co-founded Perdix Business Solutions and was a Business Analyst at Flipkart. And Manish is also an IIT- Guwahati graduate.
StartupTalky
How was GrabOnRent Started?
Everything around GrabOnRent started during one of the founders' own crises moments. And that’s exactly when the idea for GrabOnRent struck them. So it happened so that they had to organize a barbecue for a party one evening, and they ended up having a tough time just to find out where to rent it from.
And they finally decided to buy a new one because there seemed to be no way they could avail it on rent. This particular experience drew the founders closer to the tremendous amount of hassles people face while renting objects, and this triggered a new idea.
GrabOnRent - Startup Launch
“As the idea for GrabOnRent started taking shape and we were drawing out a plan of action, we had some reservations – what should be our target group, should we launch a fully functional product or a hacky one, which categories to start with, should we introduce an app-only model or an app-website model, etc”, says Shubham Jain, co-founder of GrabOnRent.
The founders then finally decided to keep the ever-increasing questions aside and they moved forward to launching their venture. Hence, GrabOnRent was launched with two preliminary categories in Bangalore. And to reach out to the target audience, the team started distributing pamphlets and as a result of which they also got the first few clients in the first week itself. All of this was followed by the fairly good inflow of orders, positive customer feedback, and guidance from industry leaders, GrabOnRent paved its way forward to the successful journey of building a startup.
StartupTalky
GrabOnRent - Competitors
Grab On Rent competes with other startups in the space like Rentomojo, Rentwala, Rentongo, Rentmasti, RentSher, etc. However, GrabOnRent is perceived to have only two of these startups as its real competitors. They are Furlenco and Rentomojo. Grab On Rent considers these two as competition for the simple reason that these startups have huge amounts under their kitties. Amongst these, Furlenco is into the opulent furniture segment and Rentomojo is dealing with furniture and appliances and both of these hold inventory whereas GrabOnRent doesn’t.
GrabOnRent - Funding and Investors
The funding amount of GrabOnRent stands at $3 million.
| Date | Stage | Amount | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| June 2016 | Seed Round | $1 Million | IvyCap Ventures, Unicorn India Ventures |
| June 2017 | Venture Round | - | IvyCap Ventures, Unicorn India Ventures |
| April 2018 | Venture Round | $2 Million | IvyCap Ventures, Unicorn India Ventures |
GrabOnRent is funded by 2 investors - Unicorn India Ventures and IvyCap Ventures.
GrabOnRent - Growth
- Serves more than 35,000 customers
- The average ticket size of INR 1800
- The average rental duration is about 12 months
- Team size of 103 across four cities
- Currently active in four cities- Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Gurugram.
- Sells more than 500 unique products across 8 different categories
StartupTalky
GrabOnRent - Future Plans
“Moving ahead, some of our plans are – We are strongly focused on expansion, and have immediate plans to launch our services in Pune, NCR region and Chennai. We wish to increase awareness about our platform and have more and more people use our services for renting purposes. Our target is to have around 2 million customers by the end of 2020", concluded Shubham Jain, co-founder of GrabOnRent.
However, sadly GrabOnRent Shut down their operations in September of 2020. It might have been due to their inability to raise more funds, being ahead of their time or them losing the trademark infringement case by GrabOn It could be a culmination of all three.
GrabOnRent - FAQs
What is GrabOnRent?
GrabOnRent helps its users in renting products online across 8 major categories namely furniture, appliances, event supplies which includes lights, sound systems, etc, bicycles, cameras, gaming consoles, party items like hukka, barbeque, etc, and adventure gear.
Does GrabOnRent own the products?
GrabOnRent doesn't own any of the items. It is a marketplace, wherein based on the customers' choice it collects the product from the vendor and delivers it. After the completion of rental tenure it returns the product back.
Who is the founder of GrabOnRent?
The founders of GrabOnRent are Manish S, Sugandhi, Shubham Jain and Aditya Sharma.
What is Rent-to-Own?
Rent-to-Own is a specially designed program. Wherein You can try the products by using them on rent and if you love them so much that you can’t live without them, purchase them from GrabOnRent at special discounted prices that are pre-defined.
Is it better to buy or rent furniture?
Buying your own furniture is an expensive process, requiring a high amount of money that requires to be paid up front. Whereas the key benefit of renting furniture is the fact that only a negligible amount is paid up front, with a reasonable rent to be paid monthly.
Has GrabOnRent Shut down?
Yes, unfortuntely, GrabOnRent has to shutdown operation in September of 2020.
Author: Rishabh Rathi
Source : https://startuptalky.com/grabonrent-success-story/
Date : 2021-04-15T17:45:00.000Z